Apollo-Theater

The Apollo-Theater once stood in Berlin’s Friedrichstraße, a broad thoroughfare in the Kreuzberg district. Built in 1874, the building began as a summer garden offering light musical entertainment before becoming a year-round hall. Over the decades its name changed several times—Olympia, Berliner Flora, Concordia—until it reopened in 1892 as the Apollo-Theater under architect Gustav Ebe and director Jacques Glück. The theatre earned its reputation through lively programmes that mixed operetta, acrobatics and early cinema. Oskar Messter showed his first films here from 1896 and premiered the Kosmograph projector in 1903. Paul Lincke composed and conducted for the house orchestra, and his operetta Frau Luna had its premiere on 1 May 1899. Other popular works included Lysistrata and Verkehrte Welt, each performed hundreds of times to packed houses. Inside, the auditorium seated 1,350 people across several tiers. The building also housed a theatre restaurant, a casino and small cinemas where controversial films like Panzerkreuzer Potemkin had their first showings. After the cinema era ended in 1930 the site was cleared, rebuilt as a block of flats, and later marked by a memorial plaque. Today nothing of the theatre remains above ground, but the address still recalls a golden age of Berlin entertainment.